Public Nuisance No. 1

This is a rather surreal comedy.It starts off in a fairly straightforward manner.Arthur Riscoe is a playing who gets drunk,is thrown out of a nightclub and drives his car into a shop.His uncle demands he get a job in his hotel in Nice.Frances Day plays a showgirl in a Mary Pickford wig who wins a raffle prize of two weeks in the same hotel.There are lots of comic twists and turns around the hotel.Frances Day sings her hit song My little dog.Arthur Riscoe was a comedian and he doesn't really do terribly well with his songs.He has comic support from radio comedian Claude Dampier.So Riscoe is rather better with the comedy than with the songs.The film is directed by Marcel Carmel who directed many of the top comedians during the thirties and forties.

I looked at a Pathescope cutdown of this movie (78 minutes trimmed to 45), an early cut-glass farce written by Val Guest (his second screen credit) and directed by Marcel Varnel. Like all examples of the peculiarly British subgenre, it relies upon speed to carry the audience along, never giving them a chance to think. Rich Arthur Riscoe -- who suggests Arthur Treacher to my febrile mind -- loves shopgirl Frances Day. She like him, but think everyone should do something. Therefore, with the connivance of his manservant, Claude Dampier -- who doesn't suggest Arthur Treacher -- he and she head to France, where he tries to engineer the takeover of a hotel where all the guests seem to be elderly, bearded gentlemen and their young and pretty nieces, while masquerading as a waiter there.

While the basic idea is good, and the setting leaves open the possibilities of some silly and risqué situations, the opportunities don't seem to be taken full advantage of (perhaps they were in the missing half hour). The pacing suggests that Varnel thought the audience would be continually convulsed with laughter, resulting in an erratic movie until the final gag. Well, they would all do better.

Riscoe himself doesn't seem very funny. He had hit the movies two or three years earlier in a double-act with Wayne Naunton, doing Englishmen Abroad movies that seem rather dull Crazy Comedies. After this, three more movies through 1941, and then silence. Apparently Riscoe was far better suited to the stage, where he appeared in shows with music by Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers through the 1950s. He died in 1954, aged 58.

The stand out section of this musical movie is Frances Day's song about a lost dog. A scene which has nothing to do with the plot such as it is but that is in keeping with the somewhat wacky atmosphere. The whole piece is studio bound although it supposedly takes place in London and Nice. There is no exterior filming and even a couple of transitional establishing shots are toy cars in front of what looks like picture postcards which adds to the theatricality. There are a number of gags when the Arthur Riscoe character directs the camera to move and refers to the watching audience and finally speaks "The End" credit an effect that predates Orson Welles use of spoken credits for "Ambersons" by many years.

All in all Marcel Varnel's direction keeps up a good pace and it's a pleasant way to pass the time savouring the more innocent era of pre-war Britain.

A film full of joy and laughter and rhyme.

Wally Patch plays an uncredited part as a Doorman at an hôtel, too.

I hope someone adds it to his filmography, as it's missing, and I only know how to add it to his Wikipaedia credits.